AWS has announced the general availability of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) C8gn network-optimized instances, boasting network performance of up to 600Gbps bandwidth.

Powered by AWS's custom Graviton4 processors, the new C8gn instances incorporate the latest 6th-generation AWS Nitro Card, which optimizes network packet processing and reduces latency for high-throughput applications.

The virtual machines provide up to 192 vCPUs and 384 gigabytes of memory, with the hyperscaler claiming they offer up to 30 percent higher compute performance compared to the prior gen EC2 C7gn instances.

The flagship c8gn.48xlarge and c8gn.metal-48xl instances deliver the maximum 600Gbps network bandwidth alongside 60Gbps EBS bandwidth.

AWS touted the new offerings as being able to handle “the most demanding network-intensive workloads,” such as virtual firewalls, routers, load balancers, proxy servers, and DDoS protection systems. The instances also excel at data analytics and tightly-coupled cluster computing applications where network throughput is critical.

The C8gn instances are initially available in AWS's US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions, with metal instance configurations exclusively available in the US East region during the launch phase.

The hyperscaler plans to offer flexible purchasing options, including On-Demand, Savings Plans, Spot instances, Dedicated instances, and Dedicated hosts, providing firms with what it views as cost optimization strategies to suit their specific workload requirements.

The staged regional rollout suggests the firm is monitoring demand patterns and infrastructure requirements before expanding availability, a common approach for high-performance instance types that require specialized hardware deployment.